Shakespeare gave us the first record of 1,700-plus words

William Shakespeare used more than 20,000 different words across his plays and poems, and his works provide the first recorded use of over 1,700 words in the English language — terms like eventful, laughable, lacklustre and accommodation.

He minted them with the everyday machinery of English: turning nouns into verbs, bolting on prefixes and suffixes, and fusing words into compounds. Many of these coinages stuck and are still in daily use four centuries later.

But “first recorded use” is not the same as “invented.”

What the Oxford English Dictionary actually tracks is the earliest written instance it can find. Many words Shakespeare gets credit for were probably already spoken; he was simply the first writer the OED can cite. As databases of older texts grow, lexicographers keep pushing those first-citation dates back, and the number credited to him has shrunk from over 2,000 to roughly 1,600. Even so, his fingerprints on English are unmatched.